Culture 101

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his monthly picks. He calls Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Happiness, the new Larry David sketch series on HBO Max, a disappointing misfire despite a cast that includes Samuel L. Jackson, Bill Hader and Barack Obama in an intro sequence. He recommends Elle, the Legally Blonde prequel on Amazon Prime, for fans of the original. And he gives a strong early endors...

Warwick Freeman came to jewelry through a school friend who claimed he knew how to make it, an overland trip from Europe to Australia, and a 40 percent import tax that meant there was very little competition when he joined Fingers gallery in Auckland in 1978. His solo exhibition Hook Hand Heart Star has toured from Die Neue Sammlung in Munich to Objectspace in Auckland, and opens at The Dowse in L...

Aronui Indigenous Arts Festival Artistic Director Cian Elyse White says this year's fleet of 550 is the largest they've ever flown. The show runs from 9 to 11 July, starting at 8pm each night over the lake, accompanied by a soundscape composed to resonate physically through the crowd before they even see the drones. Last year 36,000 people attended across the three nights. She joins Culture 101 to...

Andrew Hinton's 2014 documentary Tashi and the Monk followed a Buddhist monk running a refuge for abandoned children in the remote foothills of the Indian Himalayas. The film won 27 awards, ended up on HBO after a chance encounter in a festival shuttle bus, and raised enough money to fund two new buildings at the community. Twelve years later, Hinton has returned. Tashi is now a teenager and a big...

Sam Brooks curates Firing the Cannon, a Basement Theatre series of free play readings drawing on New Zealand's theatrical history. This year's season leaned into a queer theme almost by accident: Robert Lord's Joyful and Triumphant, Renée's Setting the Table, and Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu's The Black, a play about depression that takes the form of a stalking horse. Brooks talks about why reviving...

Freya Daly Sadgrove's poetry collection Head Girl, raw, confessional and filled with swearing, has been adapted into a new TV drama on Three, following three estranged friends navigating their twenties in Wellington. Freya was involved in early writers' room sessions but largely watched from the sidelines as her own work was reshaped by other people's hands. She describes the experience as bizarre...

Mark Mitchinson takes the title role in Auckland Theatre Company's Macbeth, opposite Sara Wiseman as Lady Macbeth, in a production reimagined in bombed-out underground tunnels above a war zone.

Sofar Sounds started in a London living room in 2009 as a way to bring intimacy back to live music, and has since hosted acts including Billie Eilish and Leon Bridges around the world. Jess Willis has relaunched it in Auckland this year, booking everything from community halls to art galleries, with audiences finding out the location only 48 hours out and the lineup not until they walk in the door...

Kim Martins has won this year's National Flash Fiction Day adult competition with a story that began life at 2000 words before being cut right back to fit the 300-word limit. The Other Jim draws on a real conversation Kim once had with her father about Apollo 13, reconstructed through memory and woven together with the more recent Artemis II mission. She joins Culture 101 to read the story and tal...

Siblings Hariata and Tamati Moriarty developed Waenga through workshops with senior Maori students at Wellington high schools, building the play around the recurring theme of young people wanting to understand a political world that often feels deliberately confusing. The show played to sold-out audiences at last year's Kia Mau Festival and has since grown into a theatre marae production directed...

Ellie Harwood co-hosts Extremely Casual Gamers, a podcast she started with friends Chris Key and Guy Mansell in 2023 to normalise gaming and strip away its stigma. She's also part of Viva La Dirt League, the Auckland-based YouTube sketch comedy group built around gaming that has millions of followers internationally yet remains little-known at home. Harwood talks about stepping away from gaming as...

Brett Haylock co-created La Clique, the cabaret show that sold out within three days of opening in Edinburgh more than twenty years ago and went on to win Olivier Awards and play the West End, Broadway and Paris. While touring, he stumbled across an abandoned picture house in Brunswick Heads, on the New South Wales coast, that had sat empty for 30 years. He bought it on instinct, and it's now home...

After his TV show Raised by Refugees, Pax Assadi was offered a standard memoir deal and turned it down, partly because at 32 he felt he hadn't lived enough to justify one. His solution was Mortified, structured not as a linear life story but as a series of deeply specific, often humiliating childhood memories, including the time he wore a full football kit, boots included, to a school awards cerem...

Roma Potiki curated Tohunga Mahi Toi, the touring exhibition restaging Robyn Kahukiwa's seminal Wahine Toa series, now showing at Pataka Art+Museum in Porirua. Potiki worked with Kahukiwa on the 1999 book Oriori, and describes an artist whose quiet mastery made you careful around her. Assembling the exhibition meant tracking down works scattered into private collections across the country; two lon...

Fiona McDonald, of Headless Chickens and Strawpeople fame, started Singalong with Fiona McDonald after being inspired by a ukulele group session. She booked a venue for 200 people not knowing if anyone would show up; seventy did, and by the end of the first night she says she was addicted. Armed with a ukulele and a screen of lyrics, she leads rooms full of strangers through songs chosen for their...

Vela Manusaute arrived in New Zealand in 1979, living in a cold Ponsonby flat and fishing five minutes from what is now the ASB Waterfront Theatre. Sons of Vao, his new play for Auckland Theatre Company, is the first Niuean story on ATC's main stage. It is also the first time Vela has written about his father, who raised his sons with violence and died before Vela could make his peace with him. He...

Scorpio Books in Christchurch turns 50 this year. Founded by David Cameron, who started with a tiny specialist shop and built it into a store with more than 30 staff and over 26,000 titles, it has survived the internet, Amazon and the Canterbury earthquakes. Head buyer Bel Monypenny joins Culture 101 to talk about what keeps an independent bookshop alive, the authors who have walked through the do...

Kura Forrester has a new TV show, a six-week-old daughter and a recent engagement. Appropriation Nation follows Kura on a journey to understand what appropriation actually is, speaking to experts including Tina Ngata about how colonial tropes still echo through to today, and a descendant of the composer of Ka Mate who surprised her with how proud he is of how famous the haka has become. She also t...

Jaenine Parkinson is the new CEO of Museums Aotearoa, the peak body for the country's museums and galleries, having come from a near-eight-year stint at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery and then a brief role at Te Papa that was disestablished in a restructure. She joins Culture 101 to discuss what she calls a feast-and-famine funding model, why the burden of caring for the nation's taonga falls al...

When the draft New Zealand Histories curriculum went out for public feedback in 2021, Grace Gassin noticed something missing: not just Asian New Zealand stories, but any critical take on how those histories fit alongside Maori and Pacific ones. The result is Between Dreams: Resistance and Representation, an essay collection she edited as Curator of Asian New Zealand Histories at Te Papa. She joins...

Karl Puschmann joins Culture 101 with his monthly TV and streaming recommendations, covering Cape Fear on Apple TV, an updated take on the Scorsese thriller with Xavier Bardem and Amy Adams; Dear England on TVNZ+, a football drama about Gareth Southgate starring Joseph Fiennes; and a verdict on Mindy Kaling's new sitcom Not Suitable for Work on Disney+.

Hana Buchanan has just published her debut collection Kupu Whenua, a bilingual Maori and New Zealand English work structured like a pepeha, with mountain, waterways, waka, birds and stars forming its chapters. Descended from Te Ati Awa and connected to the Te Aro Pa area, Buchanan wrote most of the collection on foot, walking Wellington's streets and listening for the ancestral memories she believ...

Ross McGarva learned his craft as a young art department hand on The Lord of the Rings, where he absorbed Peter Jackson's obsession with detail. His latest project is Moss & Freud, in cinemas now, a biographical drama about the friendship between supermodel Kate Moss and painter Lucian Freud. McGarva served as production designer, recreating Freud's paint-splattered Holland Park studio by plasteri...

Dan Bain first read Let the Right One In in 2019 and put it down thinking it was impossible to stage. He's now directing it at The Court Theatre in Christchurch. The Swedish vampire story follows a bullied teenager and his strange new neighbour, adapted by Jack Thorne, who also wrote Adolescence. The set has no right angles, forces perspective, is covered in mirrors, and took three model builds to...

Every King's Birthday weekend, Gore hosts the Gold Guitar Awards, celebrating the best of live country music in New Zealand and launching careers including Patsy Riggir, Kaylee Bell and Jenny Mitchell. Mike Puru, born and raised in Gore and MC of the event for around ten years, joins Culture 101 live from the thick of it.